The biggest growth in bottled beverages isn't beer or soft drinks or juices; It's water.
Bottled water is the single largest growth area among all beverages, that includes alcohol, juices and soft drinks. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over the last decade. While the recycling rate is extremely low, the demand from recyclers is actually quite high.
These so called PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) containers (fizzy drink bottles, cordial bottles, cooking oil bottles), pile up as mountains of waste.

When we talk about making cities sustainable, bike lanes and rooftop gardens get mentioned more often than better trash cans. But in our downtowns, sanitation trucks make near-constant trips to collect garbage from unsightly, overflowing containers—adding to pollution and traffic.

Containers are an extremely flexible method of construction, being both modular in shape, extremely strong structurally and readily available. Container Cities offer an alternative solution to traditional space provision. They are ideal for office and workspace, live-work and key-worker housing.

To harvest the full yield available from intermittent sources of energy like wind and solar, Cheap storage is needed. A lot of research dollars are going into building a variety of storage options for renewable energy to extend their contribution to the grid. We have too much wind at night and too much solar in the day: but seldom overlapping in any one region.

Gasometers or gasholders--huge storage containers for the gas used in heating and cooking--were built in many cities during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, when gas was a commercial byproduct of coal mining, steelmaking, and other industrial processes. Today, many of the old gasometers have been replaced by pipelines and tank farms, but a few are being adapted to new uses.

Current packaging is useful but also wasteful. Think of all the plastic and polystyrene containers that are just tossed away after opening the stuff you buy. Just In 2007, the UK alone disposed of an estimated 10.5 million tons of packaging waste. Because of its large volume, packaging waste tends to be very visible. Approximately 70% of primary packaging is used for food and drink which is often discarded in a dirty state and contaminated by residues of the original contents.

Founded in 1993 by partners Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano in New York city, LOT-EK (pronounced low-tech) is noted for its inventive reuse of prefabricated objects and industrial materials. The firm is committed to ecologically responsible methods of construction, and incorporates unexpected elements such as oil tankers and shipping containers in its residential, commercial, and institutional projects.

73 billion Styrofoam cups/plates and 190 billion plastic containers and bottles are thrown away every year. Medical evidence suggests that chemicals, as benzene & styrene in EPS (expanded polystyrene) foam are carcinogenic and may leach into food and drink. EPS cups, containers and plastic bags, are a major source of pollution on our beaches - especially after a rainstorm. EPS breaks down into small pieces, often mistaken for food by marine animals, birds and fish.

Whether it's printer cartridges, beverage containers, cell phones, eyeglasses, plastic bags or clothing, recycling products benefits not just the environment but also pretty much everyone involved. Thanks to increased consumerism, discarded clothing for instance, finds its way into landfills at an alarming rate, including one million tons of the stuff each year in the UK alone.

Worldwide consumption of disposable and single-use food/drink containers is estimated in more than 430,000,000,000 units per year, or about 140,000 each second. The majority of these units are made of EPS (Expanded Polystyrene) and are non-biodegradable and non-recyclable, requiring more than 200 years to begin even partial degradation.